The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter (26 page)

They were inside the poisonous clouds!

“Please, Anu, speak to me. I beg of you.”

Then something very much like a flattened ambassador shot up before hornblower, tiny wings buzzing.

Seatbelt
, it said.

“Ambassador, please, tell me, what have I done? Is Anu angry with me? Where is he taking me?”

Current wind patterns,
said the ambassador,
at sea level, have been calculated. These are accessible in the database. Exterior drones are unable to navigate through the seeded cumuli and remain above. They will keep watch there. Could you get the exemplar to link to the server
?

“I don’t understand.” He almost wept. “I don’t know what is required of me.”

No drones accompany us
. The ambassador had small legs, pointed and tucked under.
You are without visual but the main process has been initiated. You will need to link soon.

“Please . . .”

There are signals from the seegee. Weak, but we have a trail. Surface area of sail and the angle of descent have been reviewed. The search is currently defined to a four hundred kilometre radius, bearing seven two seven oh. Most likely he was drawn to the city. We ride at seven thousand. Six five. Six. Exemplar process has to commence before further downward travel.

Hornblower closed his eyes. All he understood was that the sky power was descending. Very soon—if he ever had the courage to look out the little covered slot again—he would learn what all the dead had learned.

Over the past few days, Octavia had been trained as a cofferer, polishing the chatelaine’s collection of silver cups; it was to this function she now returned. She had also spent time in Jesthe folding tablecloths, making candles, blending sauces, plucking chickens, counting money, and washing sheets. Trying to fall back into more routine parts of her recent days, her mind, however, whirled. Time on the streets of Nowy Solum, being with Nahid, seemed so long ago.

By mentioning the trouble she and her brother were apparently in, the fecund had indicated to Octavia that she, the monster, was aware of the duplicity. She had mentioned betrayal. The dream that Octavia had fed to the fecund already seemed to be changing patterns in startling ways, shifting invisible alliances and allegiances. Octavia had no idea what she was getting into or what she had done. Was the fecund hers now, as much as it had previously belonged to the chatelaine?

The strip of cloth had torn easily from her shift. Sucking on it, wetting it thoroughly with spit, right after leaving the chatelaine. Then she had tossed it to the fecund while the chatelaine’s batten remained in her pocket. Just like that.

The night previous, she had only dreamed of being reunited with her brother. Hadn’t she?

Now the question Octavia asked of herself was: when to leave Jesthe?

If she chose to wait, what was she waiting for?

Inside the small room where she worked were other servants, all of whom had been polishing when Octavia came back, her clothes filthy, stinking, stained with grease and lard and the moisture of vegetable peelings, dripping with meat scraps. Her thighs trickled, possibly juices from the chatelaine herself. Octavia saw the other girls raise their eyebrows and exchange hushed comments as she entered.

She took her place next to Jovi, who was fat and sullen, and who worked on utensils, while another girl, who never spoke, whom the others just called Girly, polished saucers. A third girl rubbed half-heartedly at the larger plates. All of their hands were permanently blackened by tarnish. Octavia’s were well on their way. Black hands, black face. The room smelled strongly of lemons and metal and the pervasive tang of caustic tarnish.

“Look what the cobalis spit up,” said Diogene, rubbing at a plate as if in battle; Octavia had offered no explanation why she was late for her shift or why she was covered in garbage.

Staring down, Octavia tried her best to ignore the stares and comments. These girls, like most staff, had seen the chatelaine stop by on several occasions to talk to her; they had seen Octavia’s demure responses. Of course they harboured resentments. Struggling to comprehend the situation, this change in Jesthe and in their lives, they knew only that the girl was favoured by the chatelaine when she should have been cleaning outhouses, or on the streets, where she really belonged, peeling guts from the roadside. But worse than this, the girls also knew that, despite Octavia’s melancholy, and her tattoo and proper status in Nowy Solum, Octavia was far more attractive, inside and out, than they were or could ever be, and this knowledge would never be reconciled or forgiven.

For Octavia, attentions that her body and face had received since she was a girl had never added up to anything positive. She had been raped, groped by men, slapped by white-faced women for the crime of catching the straying eye of their husbands. She had been kicked and chased and had heard so many disparaging comments that she was numb to them now. So what if Octavia had used her looks to seduce and betray the chatelaine? So what?

As she watched her distorted reflection become clearer and clearer in the curved surfaces of the cup she cleaned, she thought again about the fecund’s warning.
Big trouble
, the monster had said. Could the fecund really know what would happen? Octavia wondered how best to return to the cell for a third time. Perhaps, she thought, she should visit the monster right now, to test the fecund to see what influence she might have over the beast’s actions and ramblings—

“Here comes your friend,” said Diogene under her breath. “Fucking garbage whore.”

Sure enough, when Octavia glanced up, she saw the chatelaine coming down the hall, dressed in outlandish clothes, her cheeks smeared with grease and her hair piled high. She was smiling, waving: Octavia looked swiftly down at the floor again.

Third visit be damned. The prudent thing to do was get out of Jesthe as soon as possible.

The second cobali to die that day died quietly, without yielding any secrets. The castellan had not managed to learn any new traits of the humours, nor splice anything of interest to the small body. He had only inserted splines into each femur, working them gently into the marrow, and was about to install a series of minute gears to form a tertiary joint when life eked from the beast, rising up slowly to the ceiling in a vague shape of sadness and resignation before dispersing. The castellan stared at the emptied corpse in disbelief. He had not even really cut the creature, had not gone near its liver or spleen. He swore. Cobali were almost useless. A few small incisions, even in areas such as the groin, legs, and the hump of meat where the arms met the torso, and the little beasts expired.

He let his instruments clatter to the table. He was getting nowhere. Proclivity for easy death caused major challenges; there had to be a fire burning in the heart’s furnace and movements of chylus for the castellan to attach anything to a living body. Any fool could graft material to a corpse once the liver stopped production; an inert body was a lost cause.

What the castellan needed was either a different sort of creature or a way to come up with a furnace of his own, an external one that would keep subjects alive whether the bodies cooperated or not.

Conjuring images of this innovation, and of how it might work, the castellan rested for a while. Thanks to the frailties of his own humours, and of the pumps that circulated them, his energies waned readily of late. He was an old man. Over the past weeks—even months—research had been fruitless. Devotions flagged.

Also, Terra Bella’s visit had disturbed him more than he liked to admit.

In younger days, after seceding, he had hoped his daughter would be able to keep control of the city, perhaps even restore Nowy Solum to previous glories, but with every encounter he was reminded that the poor girl was as inefficient and fragile as he had been.

A son, thought the castellan. Like his daughter had said, he should have had a son.

What would happen when both he and Terra Bella were gone? The line of castellans and chatelaines, finished. . . .

He wanted to go to the window just then, to look out thoughtfully, but it had rained earlier and rain brought disease down from the clouds, so he just brushed idly at the blue corpse of the cobali with his hand, holding the dead face and peering into the glazed, coppery eyes. The creatures were annoying at best, though he conceded that perhaps they might harbour a remote intelligence and have primitive notions, like himself, of what challenges a family might represent.

He imagined for a moment that to catch such creatures must be a difficult task for the unscrupulous and rather overweight thief known as Tully.

Given the chance, cobali could take a nasty chunk from one’s hand—if one’s hand came too close to the round little mouths and pinsharp teeth. More than once the castellan had been forced to smash his fist down on a specimen that had fought back or had sunk its fangs into the meat of his thumb; when his mind wandered (as it often did), he could be distracted enough to let cobalis bite him.

He glanced at the third and final creature, watching as it tried to make itself smaller against the table, cowering, chattering. Did he have the energy to try again?

He did not reach for the beast. Nor pick up his tools. The small arms and legs, boney like a frog’s, had been crudely sewn together. The thread that bound the limbs was looped over a hook set into the tabletop.

This specimen was female.

What had Terra Bella said? Trapping the beasts was no longer permissible? What ridiculous bills she passed, what ridiculous pastimes. He shook his head. His daughter, too, was in need of a rest, a change of setting—

From outside the window of the dungeon came faint grunts and scrapes and a gruff curse: someone scaled the tower.
Tully
. Had to be Tully. No one else was permitted to come this high. Bringing another batch of cobali, no doubt, to cut up and kill. Timing was good. Only one left. Had he conjured Tully with his thoughts?

“Friends arrive,” he told the frightened creature, which hissed at him, so the castellan turned from his work table to watch Tully’s massive hands appear—first the knuckles of one, then of the second—on the window ledge. One day the man would fall. The castellan would not be heartbroken but would certainly struggle for a means to get more specimens.

A hairy forearm, big as a roast, then Tully’s ugly, shaggy head, red-faced, straining in the window. Tully grimaced further when he saw the castellan. “Don’t elp me, it’s all right. Just stand there.”

The castellan ignored the comments. “I ask you to wear a mask when you visit me, man. Are you well? If you have any ailments, or feel at all ill or feverish, come no closer.”

“I feel great. Just fucking great. And you ain’t taking none of my blood to look at for yer little bugs.” Grunting, and a calloused foot landed on the sill; those forearms tightened.

“Blood? I don’t want to consider your blood. But come no closer! Why isn’t your mouth covered?”

“Your little friends out there checked me on the climb. They done their tests to let me up. Your creepy helper and such. Now you just wait to see what I brung you. I was all excited-like and I forget to bring my mask. But I’m clean—”

“Remain there!” The castellan backed off. Infections and emanations from inside this cretin could kill a horse.

But the big man had clambered in. He stood in the dungeon, grinning, trying to catch his breath. He had his trap bag over his shoulder.

“You’re mad. I’ll need to have the area scrubbed. Cover your mouth, at least.”

“Look at this.” Still grinning, Tully held out the bag.

“Eh? That’s— That’s no cobali.” The castellan could tell by the way the bag hung. Forgetting his fears for a second—for he was beginning to tingle with excitement—he watched the heavy body in the bag—one body, the size of small dog or cognosci—
move
. If Tully had brought him the latter, the castellan would be furious: the beasts were stupid and filthy. Tully knew that. Yet movements in the bag mesmerized the castellan. “What do you have? What’s in there?”